Friday, October 2, 2009

Is there a prerequiste to work at the DMV that you must have the distinct ability to care as little as possible about anything while balancing the skill to annoy and piss people off?

Tuesday morning I took my daughter to her SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT for her behind-the-wheel test. You know the test. The final step that you must take in order to gain the wonderful freedom of being a licensed driver. Well, as much freedom as a 17 yr. old newly licensed driver can have between the hours of 5:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. while never having any underage passengers with her unless one of her parents is in the car with all of them.

Freedom. *Snicker*

But back to that SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT. It was at 9:30 a.m. We arrived at 9:15. This ended up being a mighty good call on my part because as it turned out her driving instructor neglected to give her the all-important "pink slip" indicating she had completed 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction. All we had was the form from her final lesson that stated "lesson 3 of 3." Not good enough. She panicked. I remained calm in the eye of the storm. It's what I do. It's why I am employed where I am. I don't panic. I quickly assessed the situation, asked them if they would take a fax if we called the company. "Yes." So within 10 minutes they had their fax....just in time for the SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT of 9:30.

Here we are waiting for them to call her for her test.

You can see the anticipation and nervousness in her eyes as well as the sheer boredom of the excellent posture I have going on.

Here we are still waiting....AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES after the SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT.

You can see how the anticipation and nervousness has been replaced with disgust and frustration as well as the attention I am now giving to every person walking up to that stupid counter wondering when in the world they are going to call my daughter up.

For anyone who has visited the CA DMV in the last two years you will automatically put the annoying voice to what we heard for over an hour:

"Now serving G42 at window number 6.""Now serving A26 at window number 3.""Now serving B4,237 at window number 8."

All I heard after 30 minutes was:

"STILL NOT SERVING ANYONE WITH A SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT."

As my daughter grew more and more frustrated, I told her this was actually part of the test. She glared at me as I continued. "They want to see how well you can get your wits about you and calm down before getting behnd the wheel of a car." She didn't buy it. Completely. But it did make her laugh.

I finally had to go up and question what the heck was going on. Or not going on in our case.

Now I have to back up just a little bit for a moment and tell you about the woman who was actually helping us at window number 2 when we initially came in to the DMB. (That is actually a typo that I decided to leave because it closely resembles the word DUMB and I find it relevant to the gov agency of which this post is dedicated.) I still haven't decided if the woman was new, not properly trained, or just missing a few links. Either way I discovered that it was her fault we sat there for so long. She neglected to let the woman giving tests that day know that the 9:30 SCHEDULED APPOINTMENT had arrived.

Hmmm. Guess she missed that lesson on day one of her new job.

So just 15 short minutes after inquiring as to why we were still sitting around, the lady called my daughter forward. And just 25 minutes later this picture was taken.

I'm sure you can come to your own conclusion about the outcome of her test.